[Indic-computing-devel] What next ?

[Arun S. <ar...@sh...>]

All,

I spent some time thinking about how we should develop the indic 
computing model with X. Of the two approaches (client side libraries vs 
server side), I tend to think that the changes should go on the server 
side. The rationale is - if I'm remotely logged into a box in some 
corner of the world (say Timbuktu) and running a unicode compliant X 
application, I can't really expect the adminstrator of the box to 
install Indic support. However, I can always control what goes into my 
own machine, which is running the X server.

My understanding is that IndiX uses the server side approach. However, 
the issue Koshy brought up is  that it breaks the X11 protocol, which is 
being looked into.

Some relevant questions:

Do we all agree that

    * the arguments to the PolyText and PolyText16 requests are
      character codes in UTF-8 and not glyph codes ?
    * the reordering and conjunctions etc happen on the server side ?
    * No X11 protocol extensions are necessary ?

I saw talk of using the RENDER extension (which was also recommended by 
the XFree86 folks). While using an extension has the advantage of not 
having to worry about protocol breakages, it doesn't come for free. I'll 
have to require the sysadmin in Timbuktu to install the library part of 
the extension. Also, the main purpose of RENDER seems to be to produce 
anti-aliased text using alpha blending techniques. Other disadvantages:

    * RENDER uses glyphs, rather than character codes as a part of the
      protocol, which runs into the Timbuktu issue

Also, I think we need to ping the XFree86 developers to see how 
receptive they're to the idea of interpreting the bytes in XDrawString16 
as character codes and not glyph codes. The writings here: 
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#x11 still seem to assume 
glyph codes and character codes.

Keyur, I was wondering if we could make your work into a library that 
can be made into a loadable module. This would ease the binary 
distribution issues. I'm very willing to spend some cycles there.

Looking forward to hearing your comments,

    -Arun